Come to Grief Read online

  There was no choice, really.

  Archie and Picton came out of the police station followed by their purposeful troop.

  Archie, sliding in beside me, said the search warrant was signed, the Superintendent had given the expedition his blessing, and off we could go to the Twyford Lower Farms.

  I sat without moving, without starting the car.

  “What’s the matter?” Archie demanded, looking at my face.

  I said with pain, “Ellis is my friend.”

  6

  Ginnie Quint was gardening in a large straw hat, businesslike gloves and gray overall dungarees, waging a losing war on weeds in flower beds in front of the comfortable main house of Twyford Lower Farms.

  “Hello, dear Sid!” She greeted me warmly, standing up, holding the dirty gloves wide and putting her soft cheek forward for a kiss of greeting. “What a nice surprise. But Ellis isn’t here, you know. He went to the races, then he was going up to the Regents Park apartment. That’s where you’ll find him, dear.”

  She looked in perplexity over my shoulder to where the Norman Picton contingent were erupting from their transport.

  Ginnie said uncertainly, “Who are your friends, dear?” Her face cleared momentarily in relief, and she exclaimed, “Why, it’s Archie Kirk! My dear man. How nice to see you.”

  Norman Picton, carrying none of Archie’s or my social-history baggage, came rather brutally to the point.

  “I’ m Detective Inspector Picton, madam, of the Thames Valley Police. I’ve reason to believe you own a blue Land-Rover, and I have a warrant to inspect it.”

  Ginnie said in bewilderment, “It’s no secret we have a Land-Rover. Of course we have. You’d better talk to my husband. Sid ... Archie ... what’s all this about?”

  “It’s possible,” I said unhappily, “that someone borrowed your Land-Rover last night and ... er . . . committed a crime.”

  “Could I see the Land-Rover, please, madam?” Picton insisted.

  “It will be in the farmyard.” Ginnie said. “I’ll get my husband to show you.”

  The scene inexorably unwound. Gordon, steaming out of the house to take charge, could do nothing but protest in the face of a properly executed search warrant. The various policemen went about their business, photographing, fingerprinting and collecting specimens of dusty earth from the tire treads. Every stage was carefully documented by the assisting constable.

  The warrant apparently covered the machinery and anything else behind the front seat. The two sticking-up handles that had looked to Jonathan like those of a lawn mower were, in fact, the handles of a lawn mower—a light electric model. There were also a dozen or so angle iron posts for fencing, also a coil of fencing wire and the tools needed for fastening the wire through the posts. There was an opened bag of horse-feed nuts. There was a rolled leather apron, like those used by farriers. There were two spades, a heavy four-pronged fork and a large knife like a machete wrapped in sacking.

  The knife was clean, sharp and oiled.

  Gordon, questioned, growled impatiently that a good workman looked after his tools. He picked up a rag and a can of oil, to prove his point. What was the knife for? Clearing ditches, thinning woodland, a hundred small jobs around the fields.

  There was a second, longer bundle of sacking lying beneath the fencing posts. I pointed to it noncommittally, and Norman Picton drew it out and unwrapped it.

  Inside there were two once-varnished wooden handles a good meter in length, with, at the business end, a heavy arrangement of metal.

  “Lopping shears,” Gordon pronounced. “For lopping off small branches of trees in the woods. Have to keep young trees pruned, you know, or you get a useless tangle where nothing will grow.”

  He took the shears from Picton’s hands to show him how they worked. The act of parting the handles widely away from each other opened heavy metal jaws at the far end; sharp, clean and oiled jaws with an opening wide enough to grip a branch three inches thick. Gordon, with a strong, quick motion, pulled the handles towards each other, and the metal jaws closed with a snap.

  “Very useful,” Gordon said, nodding, and rewrapped the shears in their sacking.

  Archie, Picton and I said nothing.

  I felt faintly sick.

  Archie walked away speechlessly and Gordon, not understanding, laid the sacking parcel back in the Land-Rover and walked after him, saying, puzzled, “Archie! What is it?”

  Picton said to me, “Well?”

  “Well,” I said, swallowing, “what if you took those shears apart? They look clean, but in the jaws ... in that hinge ... just one drop of blood ... or one hair ... that would do, wouldn’t it?”

  “So these shears fit the bill?”

  I nodded faintly. “Mr. Kirk saw the colt’s leg, like I did. And he saw the foot.” I swallowed again. “Lopping shears. Oh, Christ.”

  “It was only a horse,” he protested.

  “Some people love their horses like they do their children,” I said. “Suppose someone lopped off your son’s foot?”

  He stared. I said wryly, “Betty Bracken is the fifth bereaved owner I’ve met in the last three weeks. Their grief gets to you.”

  “My son,” he said slowly, “had a dog that got run over. He worried us sick ... wouldn’t eat properly ...” He stopped, then said, “You and Archie Kirk are too close to this.”

  “And the Great British public,” I reminded him, “poured their hearts out to those cavalry horses maimed by terrorists in Hyde Park.”

  He was old enough to remember the carnage that had given rise to the daily bulletins and to medals and hero status bestowed on Sefton, the wonderful survivor of heartless bombs set off specifically to kill harmless horses used by the army solely as a spectacle in plumed parades.

  This time the Great British public would vilify the deed, but wouldn‘t, and couldn’t, believe a national idol guilty. Terrorists, yes. Vandals, yes. Idol ... no.

  Picton and I walked in the wake of Archie and Gordon, returning to Ginnie in front of the house.

  “I don’t understand,” Ginnie was saying plaintively. “When you say the Land-Rover may have been taken and used in a crime ... what crime do you mean?”

  Gordon jumped in without waiting for Picton to explain.

  “It’s always for robbery,” he said confidently. “Where did the thieves take it?”

  Instead of answering, Norman Picton asked if it was Gordon Quint’s habit to leave the ignition key in the Land-Rover.

  “Of course not,” Gordon said, affronted. “Though a little thing like no ignition key never stops a practiced thief.”

  “If you did by any chance leave the key available—which I’m sure you didn‘t, sir, please don’t get angry—but if anyone could have found and used your key, would it have been on a key ring with a silver chain and a silver horseshoe?”

  “Oh, no,” Ginnie interrupted, utterly guilelessly. “That’s Ellis’s key ring. And it’s not a silver horseshoe, it’s white gold. I had it made especially for him last Christmas.”

  I drove Archie Kirk back to Newbury. The unmarked car ahead of us carried the four policemen and a variety of bagged, docketed, documented objects for which receipts had been given to Gordon Quint.

  Lopping shears in sacking. Machete, the same. Oily rag and oil can. Sample of horse-feed nuts. Instant photos of red-dragon logo. Careful containers of many lifted fingerprints, including one sharply defined right full hand-print from the Land-Rover’s hood that, on first inspection, matched exactly the right hand-print from the Coke can held by Jonathan at the lake.

  “There’s no doubt that it was the Quint Land-Rover in my sister’s lane,” Archie said. “There’s no doubt Ellis’s keys were in the ignition. But there’s no proof that Ellis himself was anywhere near.”

  “No,” I agreed. “No one saw him.”

  “Did Norman ask you to write a report?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’ll give your report and Jonathan’s statement to the Crown P
rosecution Service, along with his own findings. After that, it’s up to them.”

  “Mm.”

  After a silence, as if searching for words of comfort, Archie said, “You’ve done wonders.”

  “I hate it.”

  “But it doesn’t stop you.”

  What if he can’t help it . . . ? What if I couldn’t help it, either?

  At the police station, saying good-bye, Archie said, “Sid ... you don’t mind if I call you Sid? And I’m Archie, of course, as you know ... I do have some idea of what you’re facing. I just wanted you to know.”

  “I ... er ... thanks,” I said. “If you wait a minute, I’ll phone the equine hospital and find out how the colt is doing.”

  His face lightened but the news was moderate.

  “I’ve reattached the tendon,” Bill reported. “I grafted a couple of blood vessels so there’s now an adequate blood supply to the foot. Nerves are always difficult. I’ve done my absolute best and, bar infection, the foot could technically stay in place. The whole leg is now in a cast. The colt is semiconscious. We have him in slings. But you know how unpredictable this all is. Horses don’t recover as easily as humans. There’ll be no question of racing, of course, but breeding ... I understand he’s got the bloodlines of champions. Absolutely no promises, mind.”

  “You’re brilliant,” I said.

  “It’s nice,” he chuckled, “to be appreciated.”

  I said, “A policeman will come and collect some of the colt’s hair and blood.”

  “Good. Catch the bugger,” he said.

  I drove willy-nilly without haste in heavy traffic to London. By the time I reached the pub I was half an hour late for my appointment with Kevin Mills of The Pump and he wasn’t there. No balding head, no paunch, no drooping beer-frothed mustache, no cynical world-weariness.

  Without regret I mooched tiredly to the bar, bought some whisky and poured into it enough London tap water to give the distiller fits.

  All I wanted was to finish my mild tranquilizer, go home, find something to eat, and sleep. Sleep, I thought, yawning, had overall priority.

  A woman’s voice at my side upset those plans.

  “Are you Sid Halley?” it said.

  I turned reluctantly. She had shining black shoulder-length hair, bright light-blue eyes and dark-red lipstick, sharply edged. Naturally unblemished skin had been given a matte porcelain powdering. Black eyebrows and eyelashes gave her face strong definition, an impression her manner reinforced. She wore black clothes in June. I found it impossible to guess her age, within ten years, from her face, but her manicured red-nailed hands said no more than thirty.

  “I’m from The Pump,” she said. “My colleague, Kevin Mills, has been called away to a rape.”

  I said, “Oh,” vaguely.

  “I’m India Cathcart,” she said.

  I said “Oh” again, just as vaguely, but I knew her by her name, by her reputation and by her writing. She was a major columnist, a ruthless interviewer, a decon structing nemesis, a pitiless exposer of pathetic human secrets. They said she kept a penknife handy for sharpening her ball-points, She was also funny, and I, like every Pump addict, avidly read her stuff and laughed even as I winced.

  I did not, however, aim to be either her current or future quarry.

  “I came to pick up our exclusive,” she said.

  “Ah. ‘Fraid there isn’t one.”

  “But you said.”

  “I hoped,” I agreed.

  “And you haven’t answered your phone all day.”

  I unclipped my mobile phone and looked at it as if puzzled, which I wasn’t. I said, making a discovery, “It’s switched off.”

  She said, disillusioned, “I was warned you weren’t dumb.”

  There seemed to be no answer to that, so I didn’t attempt one.

  “We tried to reach you. Where have you been?”

  “Just with friends,” I said.

  “I went to Combe Bassett. What did I find? No colt, with or without feet. No Sid Halley. No sobbing colt owner. I find some batty old fusspot who says everyone went to Archie’s house.”

  I gazed at her with a benign expression. I could do a benign expression rather well.

  “So,” continued India Cathcart with visible disgust, “I go to the house of a Mr. Archibald Kirk in the village of Shelley Green, and what do I find there?”

  “What?”

  “I find about five other newspapermen, sundry photographers, a Mrs. Archibald Kirk and a deaf old gent saying ‘Eh?’ ”

  “So then what?”

  “Mrs. Kirk is lying, all wide-eyed and helpful. She’s saying she doesn’t know where anyone is. After three hours of that, I went back to Combe Bassett to look for ramblers.”

  “Did you find any?”

  “They had rambled twenty miles and had climbed a stile into a field with a resident bull. A bunch of ramblers crashed out in panic through a hedge backwards and the rest are discussing suing the farmer for letting a dangerous animal loose near a public footpath. A man with a pony-tail says he’s also suing Mrs. Bracken for not keeping her colt in a stable, thus preventing an amputation that gave his daughter hysterics.”

  “Life’s one long farce,” I said.

  A mistake. She pounced on it. “Is that your comment on the maltreatment of animals?”

  “No.”

  “Your opinion of ramblers?”

  “Footpaths are important,” I said.

  She looked past me to the bartender. “Sparkling mineral water, ice and lemon, please.”

  She paid for her own drink as a matter of course. I wondered how much of her challenging air was unconscious and habitual, or whether she volume-adjusted it according to who she was talking to. I often learned useful things about people’s characters by watching them talk to others than myself, and comparing the response.

  “You’re not playing fair,” she said, judging me over the wedge of lemon bestriding the rim of her glass. “It was The Pump’s hotline that sent you to Combe Bassett. Kevin says you pay your debts. So pay.”

  “The hotline was his own idea. Not a bad one, except for about a hundred false alarms. But there’s nothing I can tell you this evening.”

  “Not can’t. Won’t.”

  “It’s often the same thing.”

  “Spare me the philosophy!”

  “I enjoy reading your page every week,” I said.

  “But you don’t want to figure in it?”

  “That’s up to you.”

  She raised her chin. “Strong men beg me not to print what I know.”

  I didn’t want to antagonize her completely and I could forgo the passing pleasure of banter, so I gave her the benign expression and made no comment.

  She said abruptly, “Are you married?”

  “Divorced.”

  “Children?”

  I shook my head. “How about you?”

  She was more used to asking questions than answering. There was perceptible hesitation before she said, “The same.”

  I drank my scotch. I said, “Tell Kevin I’m very sorry I can’t give him his inside edge. Tell him I’ll talk to him on Monday.”

  “Not good enough.”

  “No, well ... I can’t do more.”

  “Is someone paying you?” she demanded. “Another paper?”

  I shook my head. “Maybe Monday,” I said. I put my empty glass on the bar. “Good-bye.”

  “Wait!” She gave me a straight stare, not overtly or aggressively feminist, but one that saw no need to make points in a battle that had been won by the generation before her. I thought that perhaps India Cathcart wouldn’t have made it a condition of continued marriage that I should give up the best skill I possessed. I’d married a loving and gentle girl and turned her bitter: the worst, the most miserable failure of my life.

  India Cathcart said, “Are you hungry? I’ve had nothing to eat all day. My expense account would run to two dinners.”

  There were many worse fates. I d
id a quick survey of the possibility of being deconstructed all over page fifteen, and decided as usual that playing safe had its limits. Take risks with caution: a great motto.

  “Your restaurant or mine?” I said, smiling, and was warned by the merest flash of triumph in her eyes that she thought the tarpon hooked and as good as landed.

  We ate in a noisy, brightly lit, large and crowded black-mirrored restaurant that was clearly the in-place for the in-crowd. India’s choice. India’s habitat. A few sycophantic hands shot out to make contact with her as we followed a lisping young greeter to a central, noteworthy table. India Cathcart acknowledged the plaudits and trailed me behind her like a comet’s tail (Halley’s?) while introducing me to no one.

  The menu set out to amaze, but from long habit I ordered fairly simple things that could reasonably be dealt with one-handed: watercress mousse, then duck curry with sliced baked plantains. India chose baby egg-plants with oil and pesto, followed by a large mound of crisped frogs’ legs that she ate uninhibitedly with her fingers.

  The best thing about the restaurant was that the decibel level made private conversation impossible: everything anyone said could be overheard by those at the next table.

  “So,” India raised her voice, teeth gleaming over a herb-dusted cuisse, “was Betty Bracken in tears?”

  “I didn’t see any tears.”

  “How much was the colt worth?”

  I ate some plantain and decided they’d overdone the caramel. “No one knows,” I said.

  “Kevin told me it cost a quarter of a million. You’re simply being evasive.”

  “What it cost and what it was worth are different. It might have won the Derby. It might have been worth millions. No one knows.”

  “Do you always play word games?”

  “Quite often.” I nodded. “Like you do.”

  “Where did you go to school?”

  “Ask Kevin,” I said, smiling.

  “Kevin’s told me things about you that you wouldn’t want me to know.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like it’s easy to be taken in by your peaceful front. Like you having tungsten where other people have nerves. Like you being touchy about losing a hand. That’s for starters.”